Finnish women won the right to vote a hundred years ago - Embassy of Finland, The Hague : Current Affairs. Finnish women were the first in the world fully to exercise the right to vote and to stand as a candidate in elections a hundred years ago.
With this came a reform of the parliamentary system. Women in New Zealand and Australia won the right to vote before their Finnish counterparts. What if Finland’s great teachers taught in U.S. schools? Finland’s education expert Pasi Sahlberg Finland’s Pasi Sahlberg is one of the world’s leading experts on school reform and the author of the best-selling “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?”
In this piece he writes about whether the emphasis that American school reformers put on “teacher effectiveness” is really the best approach to improving student achievement. He is director general of Finland’s Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation and has served the Finnish government in various positions and worked for the World Bank in Washington D.C. He has also been an adviser for numerous governments internationally about education policies and reforms, and is an adjunct professor of education at the University of Helsinki and University of Oulu. He can be reached at pasi.sahlberg@cimo.fi. By Pasi Sahlberg. Finland’s fighting inequality with education, and winning. What’s their secret? Finland has remade its education system to help kids like Lara Osman – born to poor, immigrant parents – grow up to be middle-class success stories.
Doug Saunders reports Photography by Sakari Piippo for The Globe and Mail In most other countries, Lara Osman’s prospects would not be good. She was born 12 years ago in a grey apartment-block district of eastern Helsinki, the first of two daughters of recent refugees from Iraq. Her father, who speaks Kurdish, is a taxi driver; her mother, who speaks Arabic and English at home but only recently mastered Finland’s difficult language, has a support job at a school.
On her wind-blasted morning walk from their apartment to her primary school, Lara passes multihued clusters of adults gathered outside the shops without much to do: Unemployment rates in this part of Helsinki are high, especially among the foreign-born, and business prospects are few. But what if we can make upward mobility happen? “Stress does not create the best results. Same. Finnish Education Chief: 'We Created a School System Based on Equality' - Christine Gross-Loh. Finnish education often seems paradoxical to outside observers because it appears to break a lot of the rules we take for granted.
Finnish children don’t begin school until age 7. They have more recess, shorter school hours than many U.S. children do (nearly 300 fewer hours per year in elementary school), and the lightest homework load of any industrialized nation. There are no gifted programs, almost no private schools, and no high-stakes national standardized tests.
Yet over the past decade Finland has consistently performed among the top nations on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15-year olds in 65 nations and territories around the world. Finland’s school children didn’t always excel. Happy Teaching, Happy Learning: 13 Secrets to Finland's Success. Published Online: June 24, 2014 By Sophia Faridi Most educators have probably found themselves wishing for a simpler solution to the hardships and inequities of the U.S. education system.
I recently got the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attend the Oppi Festival in Helsinki, Finland, with a group of seven U.S. educators to learn more about the Finnish school system and the lessons it might offer. During the trip, our group had the chance to visit several innovative schools. While I can’t say that I uncovered some mysterious holy grail of education, I did discover something that I had never considered before: the importance of happy teaching and happy learning. The Finnish National Board of Education - Education system. Equal opportunities to high-quality education The main objective of Finnish education policy is to offer all citizens equal opportunities to receive education.
The structure of the education system reflects these principles. The system is highly permeable, that is, there are no dead-ends preventing progression to higher levels of education. The focus in education is on learning rather than testing. There are no national tests for pupils in basic education in Finland. 11 Ways Finland’s Education System Shows Us that “Less is More”. When I left my 7th grade math classroom for my Fulbright research assignment in Finland I thought I would come back from this experience with more inspiring, engaging, innovative lessons.
I expected to have great new ideas on how to teach my mathematics curriculum and I would revamp my lessons so that I could include more curriculum, more math and get students to think more, talk more and do more math. This drive to do more and More and MORE is a state of existence for most teachers in the US….it is engrained in us from day one. There is a constant pressure to push our students to the next level to have them do bigger and better things. The lessons have to be more exciting, more engaging and cover more content. How Finland broke every rule — and created a top school system. Spend five minutes in Jussi Hietava’s fourth-grade math class in remote, rural Finland, and you may learn all you need to know about education reform – if you want results, try doing the opposite of what American “education reformers” think we should do in classrooms.
Instead of control, competition, stress, standardized testing, screen-based schools and loosened teacher qualifications, try warmth, collaboration, and highly professionalized, teacher-led encouragement and assessment. At the University of Eastern Finland’s Normaalikoulu teacher training school in Joensuu, Finland, you can see Hietava’s students enjoying the cutting-edge concept of “personalized learning.” 26 Amazing Facts About Finland's Unorthodox Education System. History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places. More to Finland than the northern lights. In Finland, fantasy can be more reliable than reality.
That’s why, despite the fact that 160,000 tourists travel to Lapland every year hoping to see the elusive northern lights, the Finns have installed a dead cert: Father Christmas. Come cloud or snow, solar wind or solar silence, he’ll be on duty in Santa’s Village with a warm smile and a beard fluffier than a reindeer’s tail. For me, Santa can wait. I touch down in Rovaniemi, 520 miles north of Helsinki, on a clear night, so there’s every chance of seeing the fabled aurora. Solu: the Finnish pocket computer that wants to take over the world. Personal computers, says entrepreneur Kristoffer Lawson, haven’t changed much in 20 years.
It’s still a box, a screen and, if you’re using a desktop, a keyboard. But Lawson thinks that the era of cloud computing deserves its own kind of computing device. Portable, but more powerful than a mobile, designed to be plugged into any desktop screen and with a new kind of operating system that connects more fluidly to your contacts. USSR attacks Finland - Nov 30, 1939. Also on this day Lead Story Once a hall for operettas, pantomime, political meetings, and vaudeville, the Folies Bergère in Paris introduces an elaborate revue featuring women in sensational costumes. The highly popular “Place aux Jeunes” established the Folies as the premier nightspot in Paris. In the 1890s, the Folies followed the Parisian taste for striptease... EuroHist9. Northern Lights Holidays 2015 2016. Considered to be one of the natural wonders of the world, the Aurora Borealis or ‘Northern Lights’ are a mesmerising swirling light show that dance across the night sky. Amazon brings its cloud to Finland.
Details Category: Business 22 Oct 2015 Amazon has recently set up an office in Finland – although not for the business segment it is known for among consumers across the world. The American technology giant has not forayed into Finland to expand its online marketplace but to establish an office for the customers of its cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), in Espoo.
European History.